Proof of concept
A proof of concept, often shortened to PoC, is a small, narrowly scoped piece of work built to show that a specific idea or technical approach can actually work before a team commits real budget to building it properly, with no intention of running the result in production as it stands.
Submit a project Promote a pilot toward productionReviewed by Huy Nguyen (David), CEO · Updated 18 Oct 2026 · 3 min read
This term is one of the entries in the OutsourcingVN glossary of words buyers meet while deciding whether an idea is worth building out.
Why does a proof of concept matter?
A proof of concept exists to answer one feasibility question as cheaply as possible, before anyone spends months building on an assumption that turns out to be wrong. OutsourcingVN is operated by Netbase JSC, and the discipline that makes a PoC useful is naming that one question in advance; a PoC with no stated question tends to wander into building something closer to a demo, which answers nothing in particular.
What is an example of a proof of concept in practice?
A logistics company wants to know whether an AI model can read messy, handwritten delivery notes accurately enough to be worth pursuing. Rather than building an integrated pipeline, the team runs the model against a sample of real, already-collected notes and checks the results by hand. The PoC answers exactly one question — can the model read these documents well enough, at all — and nothing about storage, access control or a user interface is built, because none of that bears on the feasibility question being tested.
What are the common misreadings of a proof of concept?
A proof of concept is not a prototype: a prototype is a more complete, usable early version of the eventual product, built for feedback on the experience, while a PoC is narrower and exists only to test whether something is technically possible at all. It is also not a minimum viable product; see the minimum viable product definition for that distinction, since an MVP is a working release real customers use, while a PoC is typically never shown to a real customer. And a proof of concept that clears its one question is not automatically ready to build on top of: moving from a validated PoC into a production service is a separate decision with its own gate.
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Common questions
Not always. A sample that is representative of the real problem is often enough to answer the feasibility question; using full production data matters more once the PoC moves toward a pilot run under real conditions.
The people who need to decide whether to invest further, typically the same stakeholders who raised the feasibility question in the first place, rather than end users or customers.
Which decisions does a proof of concept affect?
Deciding whether a validated pilot is ready to become an operated production service, through evaluation thresholds, data and access, integration, an owner and a go/no-go gate, is the subject of the from AI proof of concept to production service guide, which picks up exactly where a successful PoC leaves off. When you have an idea whose feasibility needs testing before anything bigger is committed, describe it and Netbase will respond through Netbase's own outsourcing-services platform; submit a project when you are ready.